The Man From Saigon (17 page)

In the bar, having made his bid and lost, he went to get his beer and she thought: I love him. It was an admission that angered her; it was an uncomfortable feeling, like wearing clothes that were too tight.

He returned with a full glass, a change of subject. He could do that, discard his own emotions like a coat that he removed. He said,
I don’t like Son.

I think I knew that.

I don’t trust him.

Why would you trust him? You don’t trust anyone.

I’m serious.

I can see that.

If I were you, I’d quit with him. Walk away. You don’t need to tell him why, you don’t have to have a reason
—

She interrupted him, setting her glass abruptly on to the lacquered table in front of them so that it landed with a crack.
No
, she whispered.

Susan, listen to me
—

She shook her head.
Stop it or I’m leaving.

He’s not who we all think he is. I don’t know who he is, but I am certain
—

Stop!

Maybe it’s just you he wants, but he wants something!

All this taking place in shouted whispers, their heads bent together. From a distance it would be possible to believe they were exchanging messages of love.

Oh, for God’s sake
—

He’s so damned slippery, Susan. I know everyone thinks he’s great, but I don’t
—

—
if you want to finish with me, finish with me, but don’t try and pat me on the head and send me home to Chicago. Don’t poison every contact I’ve made, or friend
—

She thought he was just talking, that his bilirubin counts had jumped again. Or maybe—ha ha—he was jealous. She had never asked him to divorce his wife. She’d never asked him for anything. With everything else that was going on, why would she expect him to make plans with her? Before they could make any plans for the future, there had to be a future. And being in a war zone didn’t make you think like that. It made you think only about right now and maybe the next day.

But now he’d received word from his wife. The news came in a short note, written in his wife’s florid hand. She had flown out to meet him in Singapore the way the wives of reporters so often did and that was when it had happened. The pregnancy was well into the second trimester now. He claimed he hadn’t known about it until this recent letter. It changed everything. She felt she shouldn’t—no, indeed, that she could not—carry on with him. They’d agreed to stop seeing each other, but here they were again, going over the same old ground.

As he continued, talking about how Susan should stop working with Son, she believed that what he meant was that he couldn’t bear the thought of her with another man. Perhaps
now that she no longer visited him in his room at night, he imagined her with someone else, even with Son. Maybe that was why he tried so hard to extract her from Son. It was a way of getting her to be closer to him. He seemed to have let her go easily enough, but no, it hadn’t been easy. It hadn’t worked. She could not understand why they did this to each other, why they’d gotten involved in the first place when both of them knew it could not end well, or why they did not separate now. Because he couldn’t stop himself, that was the reason; and she did not want to stop either.

But sitting in the jungle with the soldiers and with Son, and remembering back, she recalls the conversation differently. It hadn’t been only about their relationship; he’d been telling her something else altogether. When they’d gotten through the most awful part of their conversation, he had said,
Who do you work for?

She didn’t answer the question. It seemed like a non sequitur. She was thinking how far they’d come from the way the evening had begun, a glass slipped into her hand, his head near hers, the words:
Come and see me.
In only a few minutes, it had devolved to this. She would not be able to stop thinking of him now, not for a long while.

Have you lost your memory?
she said, wearily. She wished she could curl up with him on the bed in his big, airy hotel room, lay her head on his shoulder, sleep. She didn’t see why, if they were going to spend time together, it had to be arguing.

He smiled. He had large brown eyes, an offset nose, his teeth small and neat and white. For a few seconds, he appeared to have forgotten his question and they looked at each other, sitting close together in the leatherette sofa at the bar. She touched his face. She couldn’t help herself. I love you, she wanted to say. She thought these words so strongly that for a moment she was afraid she’d spoken them. She was startled by the possibility that the words might erupt no matter how she tried to
contain them. A musician she admired, a pianist, once told her that at the height of a concert, when the bassist and the drummer and he were in a lock, and the music was being discovered, plucked out of the air as though it had always existed somewhere in the ether, occasionally, without meaning to, he’d make a noise, calling out. He couldn’t help it, he explained; the body insisted on its own emissions. For a moment she thought that for sure she had told Marc she loved him. Or that the information had slipped into him invisibly, a parcel of thought from one heart to another. She removed her fingers from his cheek as though from a hot pan. He noticed this. He noticed even more than when she had touched him.

Why are you asking me this?
, she said. He knew who she worked for.

Susan
, he began, sadly. His voice was low, so she had to lean forward. Now she was way too close to him. She could smell his clothes, the sweet, sooty scent of marijuana. It was the same smell of his bedsheets, the same as his hair. She did not particularly like the smell, but it made her long for him. She wanted to pull away, but she couldn’t. She wanted to put her head on his chest, but she couldn’t do that either. He said,
I can tell you every article you’ve sold, and to where. Half the time I can tell you when you filed. There’s almost no place you can be where I haven’t imagined you. I know who you work for, yes, but that’s not my point.

What are you saying, then?

That you better ask yourself who Son is working for.

Every day is as hot as the last, and every hour seems exactly the same until nightfall, which comes suddenly. Then the temperature drops but the sounds remain, spookier now in the darkness. The jungle is alive with birds and monkeys, with sudden snapping branches and snagging vines and leaves, with invisible insects that buzz and swoop and form clouds in the air. The
noise is constant, the heat rises and falls. She has never been alone, not once, since arriving in this loathsome, magical, indomitable country, and now she feels utterly alone. It gives her a feeling of panic. Like a trapped animal pacing behind bars, her mind weaves back and forth. She is caged in trees and heat. The way the soldiers press on suggests there must be an end to the monotonous green, but she does not believe it.

There is also the matter of the way Son is behaving—the early pretense of disregard, almost as though he had contempt for her. Even now, he speaks to her only when the soldiers cannot hear. Otherwise, he ignores her, sometimes for half a day or more. She believes it is an act. This man who taught her to ride a Vespa, taking his life in his hands as he did, who woke her up once in the middle of the night because he’d had a dream in which they were riding in a commercial jet somewhere, possibly to America, and wanted to tell her, who bought her a whistle in case she got into trouble in a crowd and needed to signal him. He adored her, and yet he’d changed completely since their capture. She sees now what she hadn’t seen before. It is like suddenly noticing the magician’s bluff, that trick of the eye, a form of misdirection in which a larger action hides a smaller one. It is a ruse, the way he ignores her. He pretends not to know her, and that it was a coincidence they were found together in the jungle. In front of the soldiers he behaves as though he has no real feelings for her, only official ones. She sees through it now. It’s a con. Not to fool her, she has come to realize, but to fool them.

She is about to tell him this when her thoughts are interrupted by Long Hair. He sees something. He is pointing and shouting. Gap Tooth runs ahead, pushing her aside in the process, and she sees, all at once, what the soldiers are excited about. They are arriving at what looks like a small hamlet, its tidy order contrasting with the chaos of the jungle. She sees huts on stilts, shaded walkways, areas for animals. The path becomes wider; the brush and trees dissolve to a clearing.

“Oh, my God,” she says. She does not know whether to hope this might be the place where things will turn around, that the soldiers will be given word from the villagers here about where to find their unit. There is the possibility that the unit is nowhere near, or that they will find it and still not release her. She is suddenly frightened that something awful will happen now. As the soldiers quicken their pace, then run, she is filled with anticipation and dread. She does not know what to expect. Once the soldiers’ unit is found, there will be others to contend with, and it is these faceless others who worry her now.

The hamlet feels like a small, shaded oasis, though in truth it is no more than some houses set upon stilts. She is so stunned by the hamlet itself that she does not at first notice how quiet it is. No barking dogs, no grunts from pigs or other sounds you’d expect, no smoke from cooking fires or slapping of children’s bare feet against the swept earth.

She and Son wait as the soldiers go in and out of the huts, their guns ready, checking who is around to greet them, to feed them, to give them information about their unit. But it is cemetery quiet. Not even a rooster crowing.

“Don’t be scared,” Son tells her. He smiles. He makes a funny face to lighten the mood. Out of sight of the soldiers he is as he has always been toward her, and she feels herself soften toward him, feels a prickle in her throat as though she might cry. Maybe this is why he doesn’t talk to her much, because it makes her more easily upset. Why else should she begin to cry now as opposed to hours or days before?

She is distracted by the soldiers, who are moving faster and faster through doors and walkways. There is something wrong. They call, bewildered, turning to each other with expressions that show their confusion. At some point the people who live here will appear, she thinks, and they will know where the unit has gone, and everything will change. But the soldiers look
increasingly disturbed. Son, too, becomes absorbed in what is happening in the hamlet.

“Oh,” he says, as though he has just been issued a piece of information.

“What’s wrong?” she asks. To her, it seems like an ordinary hamlet. She looks to her left at what is almost surely a pig corral, like many she has seen before. She recognizes the churned-up earth, the bays of mud, a broken bucket, a pile of empty straw. Everything, she realizes with a start, except pigs.

And then she understands: the hamlet is deserted. Even the animals have been taken. They find chicken feathers, clay bottles, clothes for a baby, empty houses and empty baskets, everything in disarray. The soldiers are upset. Long Hair drops down in the middle of the open space, leaning his forehead into his hand. The thin one slouches near by, his mouth stretching toward his chin in a frown. Gap Tooth swings his sword loosely at his side, swears a few times, kicks the ground, and shouts something to Son, who answers back in French, so that she can understand, too.

“It’s nothing to do with me,” is what Son says. “Anyway, they might have left some food behind. By accident, of course.”

Gap Tooth considers this, then moves off like a scolded child. Long Hair shouts something in Vietnamese and Gap Tooth answers yes, and keeps walking. The Thin One stands quietly to one side, staring at the ground, until he is told to go search the hamlet, too.

“There may be clean water,” Son says to nobody in particular.

A few minutes later, she hears a whooping sound and now Gap Tooth runs out, holding a small sack of rice above his head as though it is treasure from the ocean. Not only rice, but the pearly white rice that is preferred, not the bran that is fed to the animals. The soldiers crowd around the sack, delighting in it, weighing the rice in their hands, sniffing it, holding it up
for inspection. The anguish of finding the hamlet deserted is replaced now with this new, festive mood. The soldiers sift through the rice for dud grains, talking excitedly, then they disperse once more, racing through the hamlet searching for more food. It might have been a treasure hunt. Long Hair calls out excitedly that he has found a few C-rations and they all run to where he stands, holding up the cans like trophies. So peasants hoard US military rations. Perhaps the whole of the country was surviving on them, she thinks.

“This could all be much worse,” Son tells her.

“I won’t get any.”

“You’ll have hot rice, warm broth. I’ll make sure of it.”

“You told me they would stop feeding me.”

“Ah, but now it is different! There is food! One day you can tell the story of how your life was saved by a bag of rice.”

They boil the rice and add some flavor from what is left of their dried fish. She stares at the pot, her stomach making audible groans as she watches. Finally, they give her some, and then more. They have found some rice wine, too. It’s in a cloudy bottle with a medicinal smell, but it is strong alcohol and it makes them optimistic. She hears Gap Tooth say he’s going to hunt for rats as surely they will be among the huts, easy to kill. He stumbles out, swaying from the rice wine, a rifle in hand, and the others laugh. Rat meat, found rice, who would have imagined she would call it a feast?

She eats until her stomach is full, the feeling like a new sensation, something to celebrate. Nobody knows what time it is. It might be midnight. It might be eight o’clock. The soldiers finish the last of the food and get out a pack of cards, inviting Son to join in. For a few hours, it seems, he will not be a prisoner. She hears them chatting together, the shuffle of cards, the ebb and flow of conversation. It sounds as though they are old friends.